If you experience slow development images with WMWare, especially with SharePoint 2013 images you can try the WMWare Defragment utility.

​I have succesfully defraged several SharePoint 2013 images and sped up them condiderably. If you wonder how much speed is gained? For my images I got from wainting a minute or two to a few second on a certain operation such as opening a site for the first time or accessing site settings.

What you need to do is:

Close your development image if it is open

Make sure you have several tens of GBs of empty space on the hard drive partition/disk where you image resides (this is required for the defragment operation)

Select your development image in WMWare

In the devices section select a virtual hard disk, a pop up should open

Then seek the Utilities drop down button and press it

The option “Defragment” should appear, select it and let the defragment operation finish

Do the same thing for all virtual hard disks in your development image

Speed up WMWare Image

This is especially useful when working with Microsft SharePoint 2013 images.

Here are a few problem which I ran into when I tried to change the versioning option for document libraries:

Problems:

1. During the list added event at a site collection level feature => this would not work for list during web provisioning but would work if the list where created through the UI as a single instance

2. When I added the version change to be performed on a lists during web provisioned event, I got errors when updating list properties => Save Conflict exception

Solutions:

To avoid the list save conflict you have to retrieve at the very least the list again from the web. I reloaded the SPSite, SPWeb and the SPList object for the list path and to be sure I ran the object creation inside elevated privilages. This allowed me to avoid the error. Sample code: